Isaac Jogues

Isaac Jogues (10 January 1607-18 October 1646) was a French Jesuit missionary in Canada who was martyred by the Mohawk Native Americans in 1646.

Biography
Isaac Jogues was born in Orleans, Kingdom of France in 1607, and he was raised in a bourgeois family. At the age of ten, he began attending Jesuit schools, and he became a novice in 1624 and an ordained Catholic priest in 1636. That year, upon hearing reports of the hardships suffered by Jesuit missionaries in North America, he was inspired to convert the Native Americans and ensure their welfare. He arrived in Quebec on 2 July 1636, and he lived in the Huron village of St. Joseph for six years, learning their ways and their language. Jogues was the first European to name Lake George, naming it Lac du Saint Sacrement. In 1641, he was sent as a missionary to the Ojibwe, and, on 3 August 1642, he and a party of other missionaries and Christianized natives were ambushed by the Mohawk. Jogues was captured and taken to their village, where the natives chopped off his thumb and was also flogged and tortured in many other excruciating ways. He escaped in 1643 and returned to France, and Pope Urban VIII considered him to be a "living martyr" and gave him dispensation to say Mass with his mutilated hand. In 1646, he returned to New France, serving as an ambassador to the Mohawk. After a plague killed thousands of Mohawk, they blamed the plague on magical powers harnessed by Catholic paraphernalia, so they killed Jogues and a fellow missionary with tomahawks at their village of Ossernenon on 18 October 1646. He was canonized in 1930.